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Mass. Teachers Association removes alleged antisemitic materials that sparked backlash

The MTA accused lawmakers of "political grandstanding" during a tense hearing on antisemitism, but agreed to remove links to the resources in question.

Max Page, president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association. Danielle Parhizkaran/Boston Globe

February 20, 2025

4 minutes to read

The Massachusetts Teachers Association said this week that it would remove from its website links to certain materials that were criticized for being antisemitic.

The MTA said it would remove “any materials that do not further the cause of promoting understanding” after the union was heavily scrutinized by a committee of lawmakers and local leaders in the State House earlier this month.

Tensions escalated during a hearing led by the 19-member Special Commission on Combatting Antisemitism. Officials accused the MTA of distributing offensive materials that presented a one-sided view of the Israel-Hamas war in the wake of Oct. 7.

Many examples were shown during the hearing, including images of the Star of David made out of folded dollar bills, a poster depicting a hand grabbing a snake’s tongue with the words “unity in confronting Zionism,” and a poster depicting a person holding an automatic weapon with the words “what was taken by force can only be returned by force.”

These images were not posted directly to the MTA website, the union said. Instead, links to the images on outside websites were posted within a members-only section of the MTA website. Union leadership is conducting an ongoing review of the resources being made available to members.

“As trusted educators, MTA members would never want to have antisemitic materials on the MTA website, and the MTA does not promote materials that direct hate at any group,” said President Max Page and Vice President Deb McCarthy in a statement.

The decision to share resources on the conflict in the Middle East was voted on by the MTA Board of Directors. Union members and staff who developed the webpage “saw the work as fluid,” Page and McCarthy said. The idea was to curate items from a wide variety of sources “with the understanding that links to materials would be added and deleted.”

Union leaders pointed out that the members-only page contains resources from organizations like the Anti-Defamation League and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as well.

“[The MTA] unequivocally condemns antisemitism and Islamophobia and all other forms of hatred and discrimination,” Page and McCarthy said.

State Rep. Simon Cataldo, the commission’s cochair, called the materials in question “heinously antisemitic” and “extremely biased” in a video posted to Instagram this week. He thanked MTA teachers for “blowing the whistle” after being “shamed” and “gaslit” by union leaders.

Cataldo said that he and state Sen. John Velis, the commission’s other cochair, heard from many members of the public who expressed their support after the hearing.

“To be frank, we needed it. It was a hard week, this was in the national news quite a bit,” Cataldo said. “We come out of this with more public support and more political goodwill than I ever could have imagined the special commission having. Today, we remain unflinching in our approach.”

Gov. Maura Healey voiced her support for the commission and the removal of the materials.

“The images on the Massachusetts Teachers Association website were antisemitic, offensive and never should have been shared in the first place,” she said in a statement to The Boston Globe.

Cataldo slowly went through the materials during the hearing. He asked Page numerous basic questions, causing the union leader to grow visibly frustrated. At one point, Page sarcastically asked Cataldo if they were in a court proceeding.

Later, someone in the audience mocked Cataldo by referring to him loudly as “Senator McCarthy,” a reference to the Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s attempts to uncover supposed communists within the U.S. government in the 1950s. The room briefly erupted in cheers.

Velis said during the hearing that the resources were “incredibly one-sided,” making him concerned that teachers using all of these materials would develop antisemitic opinions.

Page, a practicing Jew who spoke during the hearing about losing family during the Holocaust, said that this line of thinking showed disrespect to educators in the union, who are not “robots” that could be “brainwashed” by a set of materials.

Despite the concession to remove the links, Page and McCarthy continued to criticize the commission and how it conducted the hearing. Beforehand, the union was led to believe that the hearing would “provide the opportunity for a thoughtful discussion” about how teachers can educate students about the complexities of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

“Instead, the co-chair used this hearing as an opportunity to engage in political grandstanding that was disturbing to many,” Page and McCarthy said. “The way these resources were manipulated in such a fashion, so as to label the state’s largest union of educators as promoters of antisemitism, remains one of the more deplorable displays witnessed at the State House.”

This is not the first time the MTA has faced criticism for supposedly perpetuating antisemitism. The American Jewish Committee released a report last year accusing the union of waging “an aggressive campaign that has encouraged K-12 teachers to become pro-Palestinian activists and bring anti-Israel propaganda into their classrooms.”

The union approved a motion in 2023 to call for a ceasefire, using language that accused Israel of conducting a “genocidal war on the Palestinian people in Gaza.”

Some local teachers unions, like one in Newton, blasted the MTA for this language, as did groups like the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston. The ADL has also accused the union of leading a webinar that “reinforced antisemitic and anti-Israel falsehoods.”